I didn't grow up knowing I was living inside this story.

I was born into it through family, language, music, and community, but I didn't yet recognize it as such.

My abuelita turned 100 years old this year. She was born in Panama City and raised in the Canal Zone town of Paraíso, part of a generation of Black Panamanians whose lives moved between the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. When I was four, she took me there for the first time. I returned home to Brooklyn speaking Spanish, carrying pieces of a place I didn't fully understand.

I was raised in a rich Afro-Panamanian world. My family's stories, traditions, and social networks were simply part of how we lived. It wasn't until adulthood that I began to understand how fragile that world is, and how quickly it's disappearing.

In 1995, Carlos E. Russell asked a devastating question in his paper “The Last Buffalo: are Panamanians of Caribbean ancestry an endangered people?” Thirty years later, I know that question personally. My grandmother and my father are my last buffaloes.

Panama in Black comes out of that reckoning. It's my attempt to hold onto the world that shaped me before it disappears, and to understand what that world made possible far beyond the boundaries of my own family.

— Renata Romain, Director